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Friday, May 24, 2019

What a con-job...the ultimate bait and switch. Why would anyone spend so much time creating fantastical backgrounds for characters (clearly designed to bait people into this narrative) only to have them go nowhere and be nothing? Who writes a story of Anastasia Romanov only to have her end up flipping burgers in a McDonalds in Kentucky and that's the end? This is what I don't get about people who are defending Game of Thrones. You all got conned! We got conned! Because make no mistake, this is exactly what happened. You were promised a seven course meal with all the trimmings, filet mignon, salmon, pies and cakes...and the list goes on and on. You (no, WE) were teased and tantalized for eight years! And then we got a frozen dinner from Stouffers. Why is anyone happy with this ending? Are you stupid? Are you used to being treated badly?IMAGINE THIS SCENARIO:

Amazing Writer Person or AWP walks up to me (who is incredibly busy because life as a single person is hard) and begins to talk.

AWP: "Heyyyy...what's up my homie? Would you like to hear a story? It's suuuper good yo! Seriously."

Me: (Busy with about ten tasks that need to be done simultaneously)... "Eh?" I pause, thinking about that old mantra...don't let life pass you by; take time out to smell the roses. "Okay," I say. "I'm always up for a good story. Here take some of my money and now tell it to me."

AWP: "Thanks for the cash, broseff. Now I gots this story of a woman. She's from an ancient family that fled from an ancient civilization that fell to its doom when the ground upheaved underneath them in cataclysmic quakes. Beaten down, raped, and having lost everything including all the family she has left in the world, this woman walks into a frickin' bonfire with three rocks...and she comes out with three dragons! These dragons grow and become fierce just like she does. This woman conquers her naysayers and defeats all the wrongdoers of the world! She learns multiple languages, defies assassins, and is a leader whom everyone looks up to!"

Me: "What the f*ck? That's it? What about all that stuff you told me about her?"

AWP: "None of it mattered. But hey I gots another story for you? Gimme some more money and time and I'll tell it. It's better than that dragon lady."

Me: "Uh...okay...but this next one better be good I guess."

AWP: (Clears throat). "There's this guy who's a bastard. His father, see, dallied with a woman while he was at war, and as a result he was born out of wedlock. But in secret, he's actually the heir to a throne of seven kingdoms. All that stuff was a lie made up to protect him."

Me: (Clearly interested). "You're saying he's an actual king?"

AWP: "Damn straight, homie. And this guy goes north of this 800 foot wall that stretches from one shore to another on a continent with his dire wolf companion named Ghost! While there, they come across all kinds of evil undead and he actually faces off against a King Ice Zombie with the powers of a god and who rides a frickin Ice dragon! That ice dragon is so frickin powerful, it destroys that wall, and it all caves into the ocean! I mean damn! And he gets murdered by his own men and resurrected by a God so he can come back and save all of mankind like Jesus!"

Me: (Mind blown with the imagery). "This story is incredible! What happens to that guy?"

AWP: "Oh that's it. This guy just lives in a shack in the north now with his dog and drinks beer."

Me: "What the hell? That ending sucks. Why are you doing this?"

AWP. "Wwhhhat? You don't like my stories? You know...just because you go to Harvard and your last name is Kennedy, DOESN'T mean that you are going to be a senator or a judge! You can be a janitor and peak with a job at Taco Bell. That's what my story is about, you know! The extraordinary in all the ordinary!" Amazing Writer Person scoops up my money, having already taken all of my time, and says a parting, "F*ck you very much," and now he leaves.

Me: "But here's the thing!" I shout out loud. "I DON'T WANT TO LISTEN TO A STORY WHERE A MAN OR WOMAN WHO WENT TO HARVARD AND WHOSE LAST NAME IS ROCKEFELLER REACHES PEAK CAREER AT TACO BELL!!!!"

And that pretty much sums up how I feel about Game of Thrones now. All 73 episodes of it. What a dumpster fire and a disappointment. Endings matter, people.

After watching season 8, I feel like I got conned by a grifter. It’s like how I imagine really bad phone sex must be where someone gets you all worked up and then all of the sudden you get a dial tone or a busy signal. Somehow, you manage to reconnect with the person and you ask them, “Did we just get disconnected?” and they reply, “Oh no...that was the end. That was the finale. I hope you liked it.” I mean...what the hell? Who does this?

It just makes me angry. It’s like I was teased this fabulous dinner and told to invite all my friends over and then the person that teased me showed up with frozen burritos, tossed them on the porch, and drove off shouting, “Bye, Felicia,” out the window never to be seen again.

What a con-job.

I hope Bennioff and Weiss and anyone else responsible for this ending (Martin maybe?) gets teased with a fabulous vacation and when they go to actually do the vacation, it ends up a huge disappointment with them staying in a Motel 6. "Yes, sir," I hear the customer service person saying to a complaining D&D (David Bennioff and D.B. Weiss). "The pictures in the brochure DO NOT match the actual product. You should be familiar with that little trick. It's called bait and switch. Bye, Felicia."

Here's a clip from In Living Color, which explains by example everything I'm talking about. Start the video at the 3:00 mark (which it should automatically do).

Wednesday, May 22, 2019

I'm not exactly sure who drew this wallpaper. I found it in a reddit subgroup for three screen wallpapers, and it's utterly fascinating. You really should click to embiggen the picture, because it's got a ton of details that set my mind to wondering what the heck is going on with all of these images.

The ship on the right panel looks like it has the enormous jaws of some megalodon mounted on its prow through which a canon is posited for use in naval combat. Just below that is some guy in a rowboat that is right next to a dorsal fin of a shark that (from scale) looks to be about a twenty-foot great white. The bay is also literally teaming with dorsal fins of other gigantic sharks (think anywhere from 16 to 20 feet). The mountains rising from the bay that are in the background sport these colossal steel barracuda heads, and there are numerous cranes on piers overlooking the shipyard, one of which is holding a fish that is probably the size of a blue whale. There is also another kind of dead gargantuan fish near the middle of the picture with its teeth pointed upward (maybe its on its back), and half its body is on a ramp and its middle looks to be tied to one of those cranes I mentioned earlier.

In the forefront of the picture there is what looks to be a pair of rats, only they have shark tails and heads. And all of the tie-off pilings are covered in sinister-looking steel fish decorations with wide open grinning mouths and teeth.

On the left side of the picture is what looks like some kind of bay-side workshop with a portcullis that can be raised or lowered to allow small boats to enter into a kind of sluice. In this workshop are all kinds of things, but what catches my eye is a skeleton of a huge fish near the ceiling and the most gigantic fishhook I've ever seen. And there's the hints here and there of old caribbean-style piracy, with gold doubloons, scimitars, and crates. The details in this painting are quite astounding, and as I stare at it, there are so many stories that seem to pop into my mind.

Anyway, I thought I'd share this with you, seeing as there's no more Game of Thrones for me to really rant about (I will probably talk about the disappointing series finale on Friday).

Monday, May 20, 2019

You will need to watch the below embedded short (it's about a minute long) first before you understand what I'm talking about in this post. It's quite entertaining, and kind of re-imagines a portion of the Battle of Hoth sequence in animated form.

From a Generation X-er and a Baby Boomer standpoint, nostalgia can be a trippy drug, especially when it comes to Star Wars and bad guys like Darth Vader and the Emperor. For example, take Darth Vader. The tone of the original trilogy (if you try and control your nostalgic feelings of "this is totally how I see him through the lens of history") is that he was perfectly content to let the stormtroopers do the dirty work for him. This mildly suggests that if Vader were capable of spectacular displays of the Force (like blasting open a hangar door in the below short clip), Luke would never have escaped the Death Star the first time just because a measly door closed while Vader leisurely strolled over too late to get through safely.

Needless to say, if he could blow open giant metal doors, he ought to be able to just blow up smaller nearby ships with the Force too. But we never saw this happen. However, if we see Vader again in future movies, we just might see this happen because of Force and "power" creep.

To explain further, I bring all of this up because in the newest movies, the Force is portrayed as much more powerful. And it's getting more and more grandiose all of the time. What Daisy Ridley's character did in The Last Jedi by casually levitating tons of rocks might not have been a thing that even Yoda could have done in earlier movies because not enough time had passed for people to really simmer on these ideas they have regarding the power levels of characters. Simply put: as the decades roll on and on, the Force gets more and more powerful. A Yoda featured in another Star Wars movie filmed say, in 2020 or beyond, would easily be able to do what Daisy Ridley's character did in The Last Jedi, and maybe even more cool stuff.

This phenomenon of power creep is not new to fiction. It's happened to Superman too. The Superman of the 1930's could leap tall buildings. The Superman of today has all the powers of a god and is nigh unstoppable unless you have one of his very specific weaknesses: kryptonite and/or magic. It's all "power creep," and I see it happening in the Star Wars movies with each new release, animated short, and progression of stories through CGI-based animated series like The Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels.

But don't get me wrong, it's all fun. It's just something I've noticed, and I attribute a lot of the power creep to feelings of nostalgia and fondness over characters and what they could possibly do to fit any given situation.

Friday, May 17, 2019

Uh...Robert Pattinson has now been cast as The Batman. Uhm...I can't even. I-I don't like this. Say it's a nightmare or an April Fool's joke that's a month too late. Did no one at Warner Brothers even see him perform as Edward in Twilight? Did no one care? I miss the days of Christian Bale playing Batman so bad. We had it so good and never really appreciated it.

Wednesday, May 15, 2019

This is a remarkable screenshot of Daenerys and actress Amelia Clarke who is showcasing extreme anger.

The aftermath of this anger is some of the most grotesque genocide humans are capable of inflicting.

So Game of Thrones went the way of every other fantasy series that has ever been written: the only one fit to rule or save the day is in fact a straight white male. I suppose that my disappointment at the final reveal is a culmination of feelings around the concept of "I thought this story was going to be different." It seemed different. It masqueraded itself differently. But at the end of the day it was just Dynasty or Falcon Crest but with dragons. It had its female villains like Alexis Carrington, but ultimately (and at the end of the day) these women do such horrible things that the audience has no choice but to beg for a straight white man to ultimately put these "mad" women in their place.

Sigh...I've seen this story before soooo many times. I'm tired of it...exhausted even. I guess I'm too well read for this crap anymore. People who haven't read the number of books that I have will find this story refreshing. Say a person who has read maybe five books in their life. That person is going to be so surprised by "White man is the best man for the job." I'm so disappointed in myself. I've been in denial if I ever thought that Game of Thrones showcased any diversity at all, and most of this was driven by the allure of such strong female heroic figures. But in George R.R. Martin's world, there is no such thing as heroes. Daenerys, however, came really close until "The Bells" happened. Boy did I get suckered in. I got P.T. Barnumed (famous for saying "A sucker is born every minute."). Yup, that's me.

However, I would be remiss if I didn't mention things about episode 5 of season 8 that got me thinking. For one, I'm interested in the mental gymnastics of how people go about justifying Daenerys's heel turn (thanks for letting me know what this term meant Pat). It reminds me of how people can take any passage from the Bible to validate just about anything they desire. "She crucified the masters." "She said she would take what is mine in fire and blood." Yes, she did do these things. But anger is a valid emotion...any of you seen the Pixar movie, Inside Out? Anger is not madness. And being angry and hating people who have wronged you or deeply wronged you is decidedly human. It is not mentally ill. It is not crazy or "mad" as in the "Mad Hatter" which is how people referred to the condition of "crazy" before the invention of the DSM.

It bugs me deeply that people use the terms "Mad" and "Crazy" and "Mental Illness" to describe someone who cannot reasonably deal with their anger or hatred. Hate is not a mental illness. It's a response to being insulted, wronged, or being violated. Hate can arise from being disenfranchised. It can come from places we least expect it to arise, but to wrap it up in a diagnosis of "mental illness" makes it easier to ignore. It becomes someone else's problem and allows a person to wash responsibility from their hands because "that other person is just crazy."

Daenerys is now the "Mad Queen." Blah...it makes me want to throw up in my mouth just a little bit. From my point of view she is a mass murderer and definitely no longer a hero because she has murdered tons of innocent people. However, she is not "cray cray." This isn't hip hop. "Bitches be crazy, ya know?" "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned." "Women are so histrionic." "Women are so emotional." And so on and so forth. All of these one-liners going back hundreds of years are all rooted in misogyny, and it didn't need to be written that way unless the intent was to make Jon legitimate by shit-writing Daenerys. Make no mistake, folks. This is what happened here. She was a complete soaring hero up through the end of season 8 episode 3 that ended with the Night King's death. So in two episodes time, she's become a foaming at the mouth, carpet-chewing, burn them all "Mad Queen."

There are people who loved episode 5 called "The Bells." I have a red-pill friend who loves it, because, "with all of her betrayals, Cersei murdering her best friend as a big f*ck you at the gates, Cersei lying about sending troops, Cersei killing one of her dragons, the betrayal of Varys, and on top of that...getting rejected by Jon Snow [yes, I guess this is a legitimate reason for a woman to commit genocide...because...penis is so good, ya know?]...I don't think anyone, man OR woman, would have stopped or shown mercy...." I guess saying "No" really does have its consequences. Sigh.

I know incels who love it too. It fits their worldview of women, and what women do to men. I know people who are filled with bitterness and self loathing and have carried it so long it has morphed into diagnosable depression because that anger and hatred they have has no outlet. These people LOVED Daenerys burning King's Landing to the ground. "The Mad Queen!" they scream in delight.

I shake my head at the whole thing. Daenerys Targaryen was just extremely angry and packing a lot of hatred, and it just so happened that she was also packing a lot of firepower too and people paid the price. Answer me this: if the killers at Columbine high school had access to a dragon like Drogon and not assault weapons/guns, what do you think would have happened? What about the killer at Sandy Hook? What would he have done with his "dragon?" My guess is probably say "Dracarys" and burn a school to the ground and then start on the city. But what do I know?

So yeah...I'm grossly disappointed in Game of Thrones. But I also don't like how people use "Mad" and "Crazy" to describe anger and hatred. Hatred is not a mental illness, which is why mental health professionals will do nothing to stem the tide of mass shootings in our country. Hate and anger can't be dismissed, but addressing these emotions and the causes of them are probably too complex for people to want to take on unless there is no other choice.

I did love the special effects though, and I am going to finish this series by watching the last episode. I've come to far to quit now. I'm just glad it's finally over.

Monday, May 13, 2019

All my predictions have run out, and many of them proved to be not true. To say I'm disappointed in Game of Thrones's last season is an understatement. I feel like I don't even know these characters, that they have turned one-hundred eighty degrees from how I knew them to be for seven and a half seasons. I guess Daenerys is the only one strong enough to take the throne, and she is proving to be undeserving of that honor. Jon Snow is worthy of the throne, but he's not strong enough to take it, and he's completely uninterested in it. The Starks just want to be left alone. The North wants to be left alone. This whole thing just feels like a colossal waste of time.

I'm disappointed in all of the character arcs and the various plot armors that found their way onto certain characters just so that we could have ridiculous showdowns like "The Clegane Bowl."

Brienne deserved better. Jaime Lannister really went back to Cersei after all that? Blah.

George R.R. Martin spun some very interesting characters out of the ether. But if his one lesson told through the lens of a fantasy world is to say that it takes tyrants to unite kingdoms and that there are no happy endings and no true heroes, I guess I'm wondering what the point of it all is? Isn't fantasy a place where you are supposed to indulge things that don't exist in the real world? Since when did fantasy become a place to tell (and air) such depressing stories.

Friday, May 10, 2019

So, I've never been a real fan of George Lucas messing around with the original trilogy of 1) A New Hope, 2) The Empire Strikes Back, and 3) The Return of the Jedi. But after seeing this "battle of the heroes" redone online by a huge fan of the series who goes by the name FXitinPost, I now wish that Lucas had done this (or that Disney does this) to make it mesh better with the way Obi-Wan and Vader (and everyone else) fights in the prequels and sequels. The way Obi-Wan and Vader move in the original battle filmed in the seventies makes me think that they are both dealing with an enlarged prostate, which is just not how I see either of them. Please take the time to play the embedded video and let me know if you are as impressed as I was. Keep in mind that this is just some fan playing around. It'd be so much better if Industrial Light and Magic did it, using this guy's video as a starter. The whole thing is about six minutes long.